A Work in Progress

Short Story Sunday: An Act of Reparation

A new year of short stories, ah the anticipation.  This is something I approach with much eagerness and enthusiasm.  Does anyone want to read along?  I'm not sure what form it would take.  Just one short story a week and then stop by here on Sunday and tell me about it.  Maybe you'll tempt me with your story, and maybe I'll tempt you with mine?  Nothing too difficult and read at your own leisure and a story entirely your own choice.  Think about and do drop by on a Sunday if you want to chat about it!

I have masses of story collections--both by single authors and anthologies that have one theme and collections that are purely random 'best-ofs' sorts.  I toyed with the idea of taking one really good short story writer and just concentrating on her or his stories this year, but at the moment that isn't quite what I am in the mood for.  Perhaps I'll walk down that path at some point.  Although I do have a collection or two in progress (the beauty of short stories is you can read a few and then set the book aside--unless the stories are interlinked--with no worries about losing the thread since you can always come back to it later) notably by the wonderful Jane Gardam, I wanted something fresh and new.

Last year I began the year with Troubled Daughters and Twisted Wives--a collection I can recommend heartily by the way.  Vintage crime--lots to love there and I did love it.  The year before was the very exceptional Persephone Book of Short Stories which is a chunky book of stories by women (again).  It's Persephone Book #100 which is in honor of Persephone authors.  Another wonderful read and one I can definitely recommend as well.  As you can see, I like stories by women authors (though in my defense, had I chosen to concentrate on one author it would have been Anton Chekhov), so I've decided to read Infinite Riches: Classic Stories by Twentieth-Century Women Writers edited by Lynn Knight.  Doesn't it just sound like it's going to be good?  It is a collection of eighteen stories by a variety of women--many that will be familiar but a few that might perhaps be less so--from Sylvia Townsend Warner (today's story) to Colette to Dorothy Richardson.  

You never know exactly what you're in for with a short story (maybe why some readers are apprehensive of reading them?).  If "An Act of Reparation" is anything to go by, I think I'll like this collection very much.  I don't think she is a Persephone author, but I do know Virago has published her work.  I've yet to read any of her novels, but I have read a few of her stories.  Apparently she contributed short stories to the New Yorker for over forty years and published eight volumes of stories during her career.  Mentally adding her name to my list of authors to investigate further (I suspect this is going to happen a lot with this collection).  Today's story?  Think domestic fiction, but this is domestic fiction turned slightly on its head!

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you crossed the current wife of a distinguished and successful man with the former wife?  Well, in a story by Sylvia Townsend Warner the two will end up going home and cooking him a joint of meat.  The young, new wife, Valerie Hardcastle "knew where she was with a chicken". 

"A chicken was calm and straightforward: you ate it hot, then you ate it cold; and it was a further advantage that one chicken is pretty much like another.  Chicken is reliable--there is no apple-pie-bed**  side to its character.  With so much in married life proving apple-pie-beddish, the weekend chicken had been as soothing as going to church might be if you were that sort of person.  But now Fenton had turned--like any worm, she thought, though conscious that the comparison was inadequate--declaring that he was surfeited with roast chicken, that never again was she to put one of those wretched commercialized birds in front of him."

This is what Fenton has reduced his young wife to.  She's sunk in a marriage I think she hadn't quite bargained for.  Lois Hardcastle, on the other hand, made a timely escape.  She had been "writhing with boredom of being married to Fenton".  Valerie was the substituted victim (a latter day Abraham or Iphigenia)--sacrificed on the altar.  The two, Valerie and Lois happen to meet up in the bank and conscience intervenes.  Both too embarrassed to ignore the other, and Lois feeling as though some reparation for her actions must be made . . .  After a conversation concerning a chicken (or rather desire to avoid cooking one), Lois offers to help cook a joint (for something different).  Well, I won't tell you what happened after when Fenton arrives home to not one but two wives . . .

A good story to start the year off with--wry, eyebrow raising and just the sort of gentle understated humor that I love.

**apple-pie-bed?: a bed in which as a joke the sheets are doubled like the cover of an apple turnover to prevent anyone from stretching at full length between them.  (I had no idea).

Possible companion read: Lolly Willowes (have ambitiously pulled out my copy, but am just thinking about it at the moment).

* * * * *

Colin Barrett's name crossed my path earlier last year when I read (can't recall where now) about his story collection, Young Skins.  What I read was that it was memorable and a must-read.  Fine, no hint needed for me, but unfortunately it had yet to be published in the US (coming in March now).  Barrett is Irish.  What is it about the Irish--almost always whenever I have encountered an Irish short story writer, they tell stories like no one else can.  Which is part of the reason why I wanted that collection when I first read about it.  Now I have gotten a taste of his work, and I am sure I want that collection.  Utterly engaging, and you may recall one of my favorite stories last year was by fellow Irish author Danielle McLaughlin, who I am hoping will publish a story collection soon. 

"The Ways" appears in the January 5 issue of the New Yorker and takes place over the course of one day in the lives of three siblings whose parents have both died of cancer within a year of each other.  The three are left to fend for themselves with the eldest brother taking the lead and trying to keep things together for the younger two.  It would seem they are hardly getting by.  The story is less about the day to day survival (though Barrett touches on that) than the psychological--less what's happening between the siblings than what isn't.  The eldest is barely scraping by and managing the other two and the other two have drifted away from any sort of normal childhood--each in their own private world aware of the other two but not really engaging with them.  I especially liked the structure of the story which moves from sibling to sibling giving a small peek at each's world, but Barrett has made me immensely curious about them and what happens to them.  I wonder if he returns to their story in his forthcoming collection, the stories of which are set in one fictional Irish town.

You can read Colin Barrett's Q&A with the New Yorker here.

An excellent start to my short story reading on both counts.  Bring on the stories!

Up the Junction by Nell Dunn

Nell Dunn's 1963 Up the Junction, reissued by Virago as a Virago Modern Classic (#284 by the way), exudes the essence of life in Battersea, London at a time when life was both harder and easier.  Harder because not everyone had a bathroom, the young were often skint, and petty crime was rampant.  But easier too, as neighborhoods were real communities, families were close and friends even closer.  Nell Dunn moved to Battersea in 1959 and I wonder how much of her is in the "heiress from Chelsea" narrator.

"I had the first bathroom and all my friends came round to try on one another's clothes.  I had my hair bleached and done in a beehive.  I wore skin-tight white jeans and I rode on the back of a motor bike."

"I hope these books capture that extraordinary vitality when the day began around six, eating fresh rolls on the way to work and often ended after midnight kissing somewhere forbidden, someone forbidden."

Yes, indeed, she captures that feel perfectly.  It may have been a bit before my time but reading these stories made me feel like I was there and I could imagine it all perfectly.  Up the Junction is a slender book filled with interlinked stories.  Really they feel more like vignettes or sketches.  In the introduction they are called "a distillation of experience".  Reading them put me in mind of Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife.  While Worth writes about a slightly earlier era, she also tells stories of the people she served and helped as a midwife.  Dunn's world is equally as colorful and vibrant, the characters less 'characters' than almost larger than life personas, loud and idiosyncratic.

Each story is a slice of life, life lived by working class people in an area where they literally lived on top of each other.  Lily, the narrator, tells us about her best friends Rube and Sylvie, but also about their boyfriends and crushes, their families and neighbors.  You get a sense of their sorrows, pain, happiness and triumphs.  Though they are also tinged with sadness, too, for the harsh world they lived in.  And Dunn writes with the cadences and language that was Battersea ca. 1960 with lots of snippets of songs and slang.  Yes, beehives and miniskirts, painted nails and laughing voices. 

"Life's so drab you've got to wear something bright ain't you, 'Sheil?"

There's  not one story here but many.  They revolve around the three girls, older teenagers, who work in McCrindle's sweet factory by day but go out with their mates at night to scope the local talent.  They're not too worried about their boyfriends, since always another beau is around the corner.  And while they feign innocence, they are older beyond their years, and it isn't just a worry about ending up "in the club" but what happens after, when they actually are.

"The record finishes.  She whispers in my ear, 'Isn't he a darlin'?  I don't half fancy a snog tonight.'  Her black hair hangs long and thick.  'He's a couchty-mouch.  After going steady for six months you get a bit fed up, snoggin' with the same bloke every night.  And I've noticed when we're out Terry'll start staring at some other bird.  He'll say to me, 'You all right, love?'  And then his eyes will wander off and get affixiated on some silly cow.  'What are you lookin' at then?' I says.  'Am I so borin'?"

Dunn wrote about a world that now is long gone.  Progress, better housing and more modern conveniences ushered in a new era of living standards but saw also the demise of a way of life.  And like other parts of London the later gentrification of places like this meant that only the wealthy could afford to live in the places that were once populated by an entirely different strata of society.

Up the Junction and the preface and introduction to the volume were all most interesting and intriguing to read.  The stories may have filled an afternoon full of pleasant reading, but it wasn't just empty fluff.  The book serves as a sort of lesson in social history, in the most authentic of ways.  Here is a look at London street culture that will never be quite the same again.  Four of the stories in the collection were published in the New Statesman.  The book was apparently a controversial success (not surprising considering some of the topics she tackles--all quite realistically with no sentimentality and even by today's standards just a bit shocking still) and it won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

Dunn wrote other books as well as a number of successful plays and several film scripts.  It seems she is best known for her novel, Poor Cow (which I now must get my hands on).  Both it and Up the Junction were made into popular films.  The cover of my edition shows a film still.  The books/films were only two of a number made at a time when Realism was in vogue.  Mention is made of A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and a film I recall watching when I was in high school, Letter to Brezhnev.  The latter (starring a younger Peter Firth of MI-5 fame!) can be viewed on YouTube (I can vouch for that as I watched the first third before making myself stop to write this post).  

Up the Junction is exactly the sort of book that Virago would publish--one that does not shy away from difficult issues and situations, and it's the sort of book which makes me appreciate VMC books more and more.  It's the first of hopefully many I will be reading this year.  Very much recommended. 

January 1: Reading Notes for 2015

Ah, the anticipation of a fresh new reading year.  Whatever disappointments came along last year are gone and now I am looking forward to a new year filled with good books and no expectations.  This year I have no plans to share.  I am going to read at whim and not worry about accomplishing something, completing tasks or crossing books off lists. 

I have no reading list this year as a matter of fact.  My only 'plan' is to read more from my own stacks of books.  I'll still buy some new books along the way and check a few books out from the library.  For the latter, library books, I want only to be a little more discerning than I have been in the past.  I was feeling like library borrowing was part of my weekly workout in that I would lug stacks of books back and forth.  Now I want to be more conscientious about borrowing.  If I borrow a book I will borrow it with the idea I am really going to read it and not just request a title because 'it sounds good'.  Unfortunately (?) everything sounds good, so this will be a challenge for me. 

I also want to be more conscientious about which books I am reading and if something begins to pale and I think it will be set aside to languish, it needs to be weeded from the pile or I want to try and stick it out and not just start books pell mell and haphazardly.  Well, I suspect that last thing will still happen, but hopefully not to the crazy extent it did last year!  That said, I am not going to worry too much about having too  many books started, if I feel like reading two, that's okay, and if I feel like reading six, that's okay, too.

I do have some carry overs from last year, as well as a few new books to look forward to reading.  So, above you see my current reading stack on my night stand.  I think I'll save talking about them for another day.  I was hoping to finish Book of Ages last year, but maybe I will have it completed by the end of the weekend.  Everything in progress will be on my sidebar.  Mostly they are just whatever piques my interest at the moment, but I am reading A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess along with Stefanie at So Many Books, and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life is for a book club hosted by my public library that I am hoping to attend later this month.

I have a few more days left of vacation before I head back to work, and I thought to kick off the new year (sort of a little sprint to get moving) and for a little instant gratification I have picked out a few shorter novels and novellas to read, which I can likely finish in one long afternoon.  I very much enjoyed Nell Dunn's Up the Junction today (added bonus since it is a Virago Modern Classic) and will choose another book from my little pile for tomorrow.  I might try and intersperse shorter books in between longer reads which I think will help me feel like my reading isn't stagnating.

Although I am going to follow whichever reading paths strike my fancy, I do have two books/projects that I am going to begin the year with.  My 'serial' read is going to be Gillian Clarke's At the Source: A Writer's Year, which my friend Cath kindly sent to me for Christmas.  Hopefully we will be reading it together in monthly installments.  It's a book of "creative journeys" involving language, myth and nature.  One section is a journal which begins:

"On the first day of January I open a new journal and mark the clean page with a date, location, a first sentence . . .  The first words print the field of snow.  I relish the moment, the pen, the white page."

How fitting is that?

And my own little 'long read' project is finally tackling Homer.  I read excerpts of the Iliad and Odyssey in high school and will now read them in earnest with accompanying texts.  More about that later.  That is going to be my (or who knows maybe only the first one of several?) 'big read' of the year. 

This is my starting point.  Hopefully it will be a year filled with lots of literary adventures and we'll see where my reading paths take me. 

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!  Welcome to 2015 and a fresh start in all things, especially bookish!  Sorry I have been mostly absent here for the last few days, I will be around for the rest of my (quickly dwindling) break and so hope to get caught up.  I have read and appreciate all the comments and kind wishes.  I will be back later with some New Year's bookishness--yesterday I spent a few hours in a brick and mortar bookstore and bought a few books that I will share along with my plans for January.  I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday and you're all ready for new bookish adventures. 

(Oh, and that girl in the window reading?  That was me for two blissful afternoons earlier this week and I even managed to finish a couple of books--Too bad it has not been equally sunny and warm).